Attorney Dennis Kerrigan just spent a week rising at daybreak to answer e-mails and field conference calls for several hours a day before eating breakfast with his family.
He says it was a relaxing vacation.
Memorial Day, the unofficial kickoff of summer holidays in the United States, may be near, but that doesn’t mean Americans will be kicking back and relaxing. Instead, U.S. workers keep working while they are on vacation, experts and studies say.
More than a third of vacationing Americans check office e-mails, telephone voicemail and respond to all their messages, according to a recent poll.
A mere 2 percent said they were “unreachable” while off work, said the same poll conducted by FPC, a New York-based executive search firm.
Another survey showed Americans spend an average of more than five hours answering e-mails and checking telephone messages on vacations, which are typically less than a week long. That study was conducted a Pennsylvania-based maker of organizational products, Day-Timers, Inc., a unit of ACCO Brands Corp..
Kerrigan, a lawyer who works in Connecticut, spent more time than that. But the alternative — facing all that work when he got back — would be worse, he said.
“I think it actually allows me to relax,” he said. “I actually could enjoy my vacation.”
Many people feel a need to check in with work before they can relax, said Diane Halpern, director of the Berger Institute for Work, Family, and Children at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California.
“If they checked in two hours every day and felt that the office was cared for, and they could relax the other six, that’s a perfectly relaxing vacation,” she said.
“We really need to redefine our ideas that someone takes a week and does nothing,” she added. “The relaxing can come in a different way. It’s a matter of rethinking how we do it.”
Good work, and bad
There’s good work and bad when it comes to vacations, said Edward Hallowell, a psychiatrist and author of “Crazy Busy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap!”
“Unless you’re so excited about a project you just have to take it with you, that’s great. But if you’re just taking it because you don’t know what else to do or because you want to impress your boss, that’s a really bad idea,” he said.
“There are people who literally go into sort of withdrawal if they don’t have their work,” he said. “They’re lost without it. It’s not the job’s fault at all.”
Hallowell says he’s seen a movement among companies urging people to work less to stave off burnout.
“Managers and executives are wising up to the fact that this is not a good thing and it doesn’t boost productivity,” he said. “If your brain is not in tip-top shape, it’s not going to produce tip-top work, no matter how many hours you flog it.”
Barbara Weltman, a small business expert, author and columnist in Millwood, New York, vows she will not take her work along on a two-week European trip next month — only her third long vacation in three decades of working.
“You might end up losing a client or two, but in the long run this is a way to survive and thrive in your business. You have to do it. There are risks, but you don’t really have a choice,” she said.
The trick, she said, is making plans and working extra hard before she leaves, although that too has its downside.
“Everybody is saying, ’Aren’t you excited about going away?’ I say, ’No, I’m not, I can’t even think about that yet,”’ she said.